First look: Google Music

Preston Gralla |
May 15, 2011

Google's new cloud-based music service looks like a real winner.

One of the first services that Google unveiled at this week's Google I/O conference was its new cloud-based music player, Google Music. I've spend the last 12 hours using the beta of Google Music and for someone like me, with multiple PCs, a Mac, a Motorola Xoom and a Motorola Droid X, it's the Holy Grail of music players. Gone are the days of trying to copy and sync music from my main PC to everywhere else. Now, no matter where I am, as long as I've got Internet access, I've got access to my entire music collection.

If you're in the same situation as I am, find any way you can to wrangle an invitation to the beta. It's simple to install, simple to use and eliminates the hassles inherent in trying to manage a large music collection across multiple devices.

Getting started

The idea behind Google Music is simple -- upload your music collection to a Google server and then access that music collection from the cloud using a PC, Mac or Android device. iPhone and iPad users look to be out of luck, at least for now, because Google hasn't developed an iOS app for Google Music, and the Web-based version requires Flash, which iOS doesn't support.

Google Music makes it easy to upload your songs to the cloud.

You upload your collection via a Music Manager application that you download and install for either a Windows PC or a Mac. Google has made the upload process exceedingly simple. After installation, it asks whether you use iTunes or Windows Media Player for your music collection, and then automatically grabs and uploads all your music. If you prefer, you can tell it to grab music from only your music folder or from multiple other folders instead.

Your music uploads in the background; you can start listening immediately, even while the files upload. How long the upload takes will vary according to the size of your collection and your bandwidth. In my case, it took more than 13 hours to upload my nearly 2,200 music files.

Google Music handles MP3, AAC, WMA and FLAC formats, and lets you store up to 20,000 files. How much storage space that translates to will vary according to the average file size of your music. If your average file size per song is 3GB, for example, that would mean about 60GB of space.